HOPZERO Sphere of Trust vs Romana: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
HOPZERO Sphere of Trust is a commercial network access control tool by HOPZERO. Romana is a free network access control tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best network access control fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, core features, integrations, company size fit, here is our conclusion:
Mid-market and enterprise security teams managing hybrid infrastructure will get immediate value from HOPZERO Sphere of Trust because it enforces network containment without requiring endpoint agents or VLAN redesigns, letting you segment at the packet level across on-premises and cloud simultaneously. The switch port policy injection capability means enforcement happens at network edges, not dependent on agent adoption timelines. This tool prioritizes active containment and anomaly detection over incident recovery, so it's not the right fit for organizations still building foundational SIEM pipelines or those needing deep forensic replay capabilities after compromise.
Kubernetes platform teams operating on-premises or in OpenStack environments should pick Romana for its topology-aware IPAM that enforces network policy without overlay complexity, eliminating a major source of troubleshooting overhead in multi-tenant clusters. The free pricing and 249 GitHub stars indicate active maintenance, and the native policy approach maps cleanly to NIST Govern functions around access control architecture. Skip this if you're cloud-locked on AWS or GCP; Romana's value evaporates when your infrastructure already handles IP management and you need tight vendor integration with cloud-native IAM.
